Words, words, words.
If you’re a lover of words – or at least the sheer quantity thereof – then you need to spend some time with my daughter. Taking the place of C last night, who was otherwise detained by work, my daughter spent the better part of an hour continually flapping her gums during our evening walk.
i won’t bore you with the details about what she talked about, because quite honestly, i’m pretty damned sure she covered every topic under the sun. She may have even mentioned you at some point.
All told, i think i might have been able to take up about 7 minutes of air time, but she covered the rest – with no commercial breaks. But don’t get me wrong – i’m not complaining. Listening to her is much better than not.
Right before our walk, my oldest reminded me to “wear my ear plugs”. And how i wish i had to use the same advice with him. Unlike my daughter however, he is most decidedly mum on most points. Even “i love you”s are acknowledged with mumbled “OK”s – if acknowledged at all. No need to ask that one how he’s doing either – both the ecstatic and the doomed are equally expressed with the same noncommittal monotone “OK”.
With both children “parenting” can be tricky. And by parenting, i mean keeping track of what’s going on in their lives and keeping up with how they feel about it. Whereas my son says almost nothing, my daughter says so much about any given subject, that you find yourself wondering, what exactly, she meant by all of it at the end.
In short, she’s going to be a Great sermon writer one day.
My youngest is probably the easiest to understand, but you might say that that is because of the three, he has it the easiest overall. Not being burdened with being “First Born”, he doesn’t feel the need to blaze any trails (so to speak), and not being a girl, he doesn’t feel the need to be, well, a girl (more to the point, a daddy’s little girl?). Of the three, i guess he gets to be – and feels most comfortable being – just him.
And the “him” that he is is a total nut case at times, engaging you in a topic that he himself forgets half way through the conversation. You’ll know it when it happens – his eyes turn sour, his lip curls down, and you can almost see the “wait… what were we talking about?” question practically sitting above his head like a cartoon cloud.
i can’t be sure if he feels most at ease because he is the youngest – and this just happens as a normal course of events – or if it’s because i made the bulk of my parenting mistakes on the first two. What i do know is that i love all three, each for their own qualities. Whether it be the mumbles, the incomprehensible insights or the verbal explosions of cascading words. Words, words, words.
Because whether they use a million words or just one, they fill my life with thoughts and feelings i never had before – maybe never would have had – had it not been for them being in my life in the first place. And while “love” itself is just another word, in this instance it has more meaning than i could ever express with any other.
as long as i'm singing 